Campus Tourism Meets Harry Potter

The rapid rise of social media in the 2010s created a more individualistic tourism. Instantaneous electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) enabled tourists to choose their destinations based on the recommendations of others: a phase increasingly marked by the rise of bloggers and influencers and the search for ‘authenticity’. This more individualistic tourism is elaborated through a focus on two interlocking niches: education or campus tourism and the particular and highly unusual version of that which drew tourists to the University of Sydney in search of traces of Harry Potter. This chapter traces and accounts for the rise of a daka destination, that is a ‘marked place’ that should be visited, and which many claimed to have discovered or seen in a new light. The chapter considers why social media was so successful in directing tourists to the ‘Harry Potter building’ at the University of Sydney, why this particular site was attractive and how this initiated the creation of a new Chinese tourist geography.